Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

Post by seanhunter » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

wtetzner wrote: post #239

seanhunter wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There literally is a plugin [1] containing sensible defaults that everyone in the community agrees would be good as default but “backspace” and “incsearch” are the most obvious. “Backspace” allows you to delete with the backspace key beyond the point where you pressed “insert”. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who thinks the vim default (not allowing this) is ergonomic. [1] https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible

Have these already been adopted in neovim by default? It seems like I already have this behavior without needing any plugins.

There are quite a lot of default changes so go :he nvim-defaults to get them all but yes, the default setup in neovim is much more sane.

Post by auraham » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 4:46 AM UTC

I tried helix a few months ago. Before that, I gave it a try several times. The editor is fine, but I always go back to vim and vscode for these reasons:

- In vim, I can use vim-fugitive [1] to easily run git add and git commit. Not sure if helix has that level of integration with Git (I like the gutter, though). I know that we can use tools like lazygit within Helix, but I think :Gw and :Git commit are more ergonomic.

- I prefer vscode to code in Rust because of rust-analyzer [2]. That plugin gives me type type annotations along each variable. Helix can also provide some hints, but not that many as rust-analyzer.

[1] https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive

[2] https://rust-analyzer.github.io/book/vs_code.html

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim